Gone, Baby, Gone (16 page)

Though his flesh jiggled when he walked and his fashion sense ran toward the fleece or thick cotton sweats favored by overweight men everywhere, it would have been a large error to mistake Cheese for a jolly fat guy or confuse his bulk with a lack of speed.

Cheese smiled a lot, and there was a very real joy that seemed to overtake him in the presence of some people. And for all the wincing that his dated, pseudo Shaft-speak could induce in people, there was something strangely endearing and infectious about it. You’d find yourself listening to him talk and you’d wonder if his adoption of a slang very few people—black or white—had ever truly spoken this side of a Fred Williamson/Antonio Fargas opus was misplaced affection for black ghetto culture, deranged racism, or both. In any case, it could be damn catchy.

But I was also familiar with the Cheese who’d glanced at a guy in a bar one night with such self-possessed malevolence you knew the guy’s life expectancy had just dropped to about a minute and a half. I knew the Cheese who employed girls so thin and skagged out they could disappear by ducking behind a baseball bat, took rolls of bills from them as they leaned into his car, patted their bony asses, and sent them back to work.

And all the rounds he bought at the bar, all the fins and sawbucks he pressed into the flesh of broken rummies and then drove them to get Chinese with it, all the turkeys he handed out to the neighborhood poor at Christmas couldn’t erase the junkies who’d died in hallways with spikes still sticking out of their arms; the young women who turned into craven hags seemingly overnight, gums bleeding, begging in the subways for money to spend on AZT treatments; the names he’d personally edited from next year’s phone books.

A freak of both nature and nurture, Cheese had been small and sickly through most of grade school; his rib cage had shone through his cheap white shirt like an old man’s fingers; he sometimes had coughing fits so violent he’d vomit. He rarely spoke. He had no friends that I remember, and while most of us ate lunch from
Adam-12
and Barbie lunch boxes, Cheese carried his in a brown paper bag that he carefully folded after he was done and took home to use again.

Both parents walked him up to the schoolyard gate every morning for the first few years. They’d speak to him in a foreign tongue, and their brusque voices carried into the schoolyard as they fussed with their son’s hair or scarf, fiddled with the buttons on his heavy peasant’s coat, before setting him free. They’d walk back down the avenue—giants, both of them—Mr. Olamon wearing a satin fedora at least fifteen years out of fashion with a weathered orange feather in the band, his head cocked slightly, as if he expected taunts or trash to be hurled down on him and his wife from second-story porches. Cheese would watch them until they were out of sight, wincing if his mother paused to pull a sagging sock back up over her thick ankle.

For whatever reason, the memories I have of Cheese and his parents seem trapped in the saber-blade sunlight of early winter: snapshots of an ugly little boy at the edge of a schoolyard pocked with half-frozen puddles watching his gigantic parents stoop their shoulders and walk under shivering black trees.

Cheese took multiple shit and multiple beatings for his light accent, his parents’ far thicker ones, his country-village clothes, and his skin, which had a soapy, yellowish luster that reminded kids of bad cheese. Hence the name.

During Cheese’s seventh year at St. Bart’s, his father, a janitor at an exclusive grade school in Brookline, was indicted for physically assaulting a ten-year-old student who’d spit on the floor. The child, the son of a Mass General neurosurgeon and visiting professor at Harvard, had received a broken arm and nose in the few seconds of Mr. Olamon’s sudden attack, and the penalty promised to be stiff. The same year, Cheese grew ten inches in five months.

The next year—the year of his father’s conviction and sentence to three-to-six—Cheese bulked up.

Fourteen years of being pissed on went into the muscle mass, fourteen years of being taunted and having his slight accent aped, fourteen years of humiliation and swallowed rage turned into a hot, calcified cannonball of bile in his stomach.

That summer between eighth grade and high school became Cheese Olamon’s Summer of Payback. Kids got sucker-punched rounding corners, looked up from the sidewalk to see one of Cheese’s size twelves descending into their ribs. There were broken noses and broken arms, and Carl Cox—one of Cheese’s oldest and most merciless tormentors—got a rock dropped on his head from a three-decker roof that, among other things, tore off half his ear and left him talking funny for the rest of his life.

It wasn’t just the boys from our graduating class at St. Bart’s who got it, either; several fourteen-year-old girls spent that summer with bandages over their noses or making trips to the dentist to repair broken teeth.

Even then, though, Cheese knew how to pick his targets. The ones whom he correctly guessed were too timid or powerless to come back against him saw his face when he hurt them. The ones he hurt worst—and therefore those most likely to speak to the police or their parents—never saw anything at all.

Among the ones who escaped Cheese’s revenge were Phil, Angie, and myself, who’d never tormented him, if only because we each had at least one unfashionably immigrant parent ourselves. And Cheese left Bubba Rogowski alone, as well. I don’t remember if Bubba had ever messed with Cheese or not, but even if he had, Cheese was smart enough to know that, when it came to warfare, Cheese would be the German army and Bubba the Russian winter. So Cheese stuck to the fronts and battles he knew he could win.

No matter how much bigger, craftier, and more dangerously psychotic Cheese became over the years, he maintained an almost sycophantic persona in Bubba’s presence, even going so far as to personally feed and groom Bubba’s dogs when Bubba was overseas on various weapons buys.

That’s Bubba for you. The people who terrify you and me feed his dogs.

“‘Mother institutionalized when subject was seventeen,’” Broussard read from Cheese Olamon’s file, as Poole drove past Walden Pond Nature Preserve toward Concord Prison. “‘Father released from Norfolk a year later, disappeared.’”

“Rumor has it Cheese killed him,” I said. I lounged in the backseat, head against the window, Concord’s glorious trees floating past.

After Broussard and Poole had called in the double homicide at Wee David’s, Angie and I took the bag of money and drove Helene back to Lionel’s house. We dropped her off and drove to Bubba’s warehouse.

Two o’clock in the afternoon is prime sleeping time for Bubba, and we were greeted at the door by the sight of him in a flaming red Japanese kimono and a somewhat irritated look on that deranged cherub’s face of his.

“Why am I awake?” he said.

“We need your safe,” Angie said.

“You own a safe.” He glowered at me.

I looked up into his glare. “Ours doesn’t have a minefield protecting it.”

He held out his hand, and Angie placed the bag in it.

“Contents?” Bubba said.

“Two hundred grand.”

Bubba nodded as if we’d just said Grandmother’s heirlooms. We could have told him Proof of extraterrestrials, and the reaction would have been the same. Unless you could hook him up on a date with Jane Seymour, Bubba’s pretty hard to impress.

Angie pulled the pictures of Corwin Earle and Leon and Roberta Trett from her bag, fanned them up in front of Bubba’s sleepy face. “Know any of them?”

“Hot goddamn!” he said.

“You do?” Angie said.

“Huh?” He shook his head. “No. That’s one big hairy bitch, though. She walk upright and everything?”

Angie sighed and put the photos back in her bag.

“The other two were cons,” Bubba said. “Never met ’em, but you can always tell.”

He yawned, nodded, and shut the door in our faces.

“It wasn’t his presence I missed when he was in jail,” Angie said.

“It was the engaging verbal discourse,” I said.

Angie dropped me back at my apartment, where I waited for Poole and Broussard, while she drove over to Chris Mullen’s condo building to begin surveillance. She opted for the duty because she’s never been real keen on entering men’s prisons. Besides, Cheese gets kind of funny around her, takes to blushing and asking her who she’s dating these days. I took the ride with Poole and Broussard because I was an allegedly friendly face, and Cheese has never been known for cooperating with the men in blue.

“Suspect in the death of one Jo Jo McDaniel, 1986,” Broussard said, as we wound our way up Route 2.

“Cheese’s mentor in the drug trade,” I said.

Broussard nodded. “Suspect in the disappearance and suspected death of Daniel Caleb, 1991.”

“Didn’t hear about that one.”

“Accountant.” Broussard flipped a page. “Supposedly cooked books for a few unsavory characters.”

“Cheese caught him with his hand in the till.”

“Apparently.”

Poole caught my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Quite the association you have with the criminal element, Patrick.”

I sat up in the seat. “Gee, Poole, whatever could you mean?”

“Friends with Cheese Olamon and Chris Mullen,” Broussard said.

“They’re not friends. Just guys I grew up with.”

“Didn’t you also grow up with the late Kevin Hurlihy?” Poole brought the car to a stop in the left lane, waiting for a break in traffic on the other side of the road so he could cross Route 2 and enter the prison driveway.

“Last I heard, Kevin was just missing,” I said.

Broussard smiled over the seat at me. “And let’s not forget the infamous Mr. Rogowski.”

I shrugged. I was used to my association with Bubba raising eyebrows. Especially cops’ eyebrows.

“Bubba’s a friend,” I said.

“Hell of a friend,” Broussard said. “Is it true he’s got a floor of his warehouse mined with explosives?”

I shrugged. “Drop in on him sometime, see for yourself.”

Poole chuckled. “Talk about your early retirement plans.” He turned into the gravel driveway of the prison. “Some neighborhood you come from, Patrick, that’s all. Some neighborhood.”

“We’re just misunderstood down there,” I said. “Hearts of gold, every one of us.”

When we stepped out of the car, Broussard stretched and said, “Oscar Lee tells me you’re not comfortable with judgment.”

“With what?” I said, and looked up at the prison walls. Typical of Concord. Even the prison looked inviting.

“Judgment,” Broussard said. “Oscar says you hate judging people.”

I followed the cyclone wire at the top of the wall. A little less inviting, suddenly.

“Says that’s why you hang with a psycho like Rogowski, maintain relations with the likes of Cheese Olamon.”

I squinted into the bright sun. “No,” I said. “I’m not very good at judging people. Every now and then I’ve had to.”

“And?” Poole said.

I shrugged. “Left a bad taste in my mouth.”

“So you judged poorly?” Poole said lightly.

I thought of my calling Helene “stupid” just a couple of hours ago; the way the word seemed to shrink her and stab her at the same time. I shook my head. “No. My judgment was correct. Just left a bad taste in my mouth. Simple as that.”

I stuck my hands in my pockets and walked toward the front door of the prison before Poole and Broussard could think of any more questions regarding my character or lack thereof.

The warden posted a guard at each of the two gates that led in and out of the small visitor’ yard at Concord Prison, and the guards in the towers shifted their attention to us. Cheese was already there when we arrived. He was the only convict in the yard, Broussard and Poole having requested as much privacy as possible.

“Yo, Patrick, how’s it hanging?” Cheese called, as we crossed the yard. He stood by a water fountain. In comparison to the Orca with yellow hair that was Cheese, the fountain looked like a golf tee.

“Not bad, Cheese. It’s a nice day.”

“I am fucking down with that, brother.” He brought his fist down on top of my own. “Day like this is like righteous pussy, Jack Daniel’s, and a pack of Kools all rolled into one. Know what I’m saying?”

I didn’t, but I smiled. That’s how it worked with Cheese. You nodded, you smiled, you wondered when he’d start making some sense.

“Damn!” Cheese reared back on his heels. “You brought yourself the law with you. The Man is in the house!” he shouted. “In da house. Poole and…”—he snapped his fingers—“Broussard. Right? Thought you boys left Narco.”

Poole smiled into the sun. “We did, Mr. Cheese, sir. We certainly did.” He pointed to a long dark scab on Cheese’s chin. It looked like a slice left by a jagged blade. “You’ve been making enemies here?”

“This? Shit.” Cheese rolled his eyes at me. “Motherfucker ain’t been born yet can put the Cheese down.”

Broussard chuckled and toed the dirt with his left foot. “Yeah, Cheese, sure. You been talking your black rap and pissed off some brother don’t like white boys with a confused sense of identity. That it?”

“Yo, Poole,” Cheese said, “what’s a cool-as-ice-cream cat like yourself doing with this deadweight-nappy-headed-couldn’t-find-his-own-ass-with-a-map motherfucker?”

“Slumming,” Poole said, and a small smile twitched the corners of Broussard’s mouth.

“Heard you lost a bag of cash,” Broussard said.

“You did?” Cheese rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Can’t rightly recall that, officer, but you got a bag of cash you’re looking to unload—well, I’ll be happy to take it off your hands. Give it to my man Patrick, he’ll hold it for me till I get out.”

“Aww, Cheese,” I said, “that’s touching.”

“We down, brother, ’cause I
know
your shit’s straight. How’s Brother Rogowski?”

“Fine.”

“Motherfucker did a year in Plymouth? Cons still shaking in that place. ’Fraid he might come
back
, he seemed to like it so much.”

“He ain’t going back,” I said. “He missed a year of TV he’s still catching up on.”

“How’re the dogs?” Cheese whispered, as if they were a secret.

“Belker died about a month ago.”

The information rocked Cheese in place for a moment. He looked up at the sky as a soft breeze found his eyelids. “How’d he die?” He looked at me. “Poison?”